Of society, direction, and planning
May. 5th, 2012 12:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davvSome time ago, while talking to a bird, I eventually came upon the subject of society. I noted that there were, broadly speaking, two types of governmental scale society. On the one hand, you have the typical liberal democracy, where there are thousands of tugs, all in different directions, all competing and mostly canceling out. On the other, you have coordinated states where there are just a few directions and they're all shown to you. The organization of society itself gives direction, but it might not be the direction you would like; authoritarian and totalitarian governments are infamous for this kind of thing.
I definitely can see the appeal of a directed (less chaotic) society, in general. If the "system" knows you better than you do and can nudge you in the right direction, if it can take a wider position and place people just right, then it starts to be about something. One could imagine it having a purpose.
On the other hand, almost wherever people have tried to set up that kind of large-scale direction, things have gone wrong. The story tends to be the same: authorities establish themselves and set a barrier to feedback. Thus insulated from the world around them, they go on a wild chase that, as the anarchists say,
hurts both them and their figurative subjects. "He steered us through the shadows / Upon an angry tide / And cast us one by one over the side".
So could we fix that problem by having no authority? Even without unaccountable authority, large-scale direction tend to lead to unwelcome dynamics. In some areas, we already have direction -- groups whose members have picked a purpose for themselves -- and we've seen what happens when they begin to lose touch with
reality. Sports fans make a good example; when the group gets too wrapped up in its own identity, individual accountability vanishes. The people in the group give each other permission to leave all restraint behind - in the sports example, you get hooliganism. Furthermore, if the dynamics become more extreme, direction shines like a laser. Those who depart just a little from it face the wrath of the group, even if that exploration would ultimately lead to a better result.
To some extent, we can see those dynamics in "chaotic" society: polarization, "with us or against us" thinking, and overly strong focus on exploitation rather than exploration leads to that concept of many phrases: deru kui wa utareru, tall poppy syndrome, maaiveldcultuur or Jante law.
Thus it appears that maintaining a directed society is a very tall order indeed. We can't have unaccountable authority, for the authority gets corrupted and twists both itself and its subjects; but we can't have an absence of regulation either, because that either leads to fragmentation or to the unfortunate emergent properties to come into being.
I can see two solutions (apart from dissolving the problem), and neither is easy.
The first is, as has been suggested for other worlds, to have some sort of authority almost divine in its capacity to resist corruption and to embody civilization. But if beings of such complexity - of such variety - exist, then the task of managing a directed society becomes harder, too, because those beings will exist among the managed as well.
The second is to strike some balance. That is, I think, the social anarchist approach. Have communities that are about something, but recognize that they can't be too large. Give people freedom of which community to belong to. Direction need not imply strict centralized planning, the argument goes: as in other matters, have
the smaller units deal with the details, then hand what they can't handle by themselves up to the higher level and let the order grow upwards rather than being imposed from the outside.
Finally, I think I see a more general pattern. When there are many different parts (types of people, economic organizations) and they're supposed to be organized (directed society, economic planning), one usually gets one of two solutions: either that which says "let what happens happen", which leads to great highs but also lows; or that which says "let us regulate and consciously plan", which leads to uniformity. Why? I think it's as simple as this: the regulators in the second case would suffer from information overload were they to try to preserve all the different shapes of the highs while avoiding the lows, so they don't. Meanwhile, in the former case, there is no plan and so there is nothing to constrain the multitude either - with all the consequences, good and bad. "If only there were a better filtering algorithm, there wouldn't be information overload" :) And I suppose that's C&C's approach to economic planning.
Or in an opaque reference, back on directed society, and on a story that has it: if there are many ishas and many hhaza, the nobles must be very good. Government usually isn't that good, so it says there are only a few. Uniformity follows. Whether we pick chaos or heavy-handed planning, there will then be many rakadhas: in the former case, those who never find their position; in the latter, those who are forced into the wrong one because of the regulatory system's inability to respond well enough.
Yes, Kherishdar is a directed society that works - for Ai-Naidar, with the emperor and nobles. How would we find emperors and nobles of that quality here? Long-term consensus (huge supermajority) elections? Policy juries to evaluate candidates? And even if we did find them, would that society be desirable, for us?
I definitely can see the appeal of a directed (less chaotic) society, in general. If the "system" knows you better than you do and can nudge you in the right direction, if it can take a wider position and place people just right, then it starts to be about something. One could imagine it having a purpose.
On the other hand, almost wherever people have tried to set up that kind of large-scale direction, things have gone wrong. The story tends to be the same: authorities establish themselves and set a barrier to feedback. Thus insulated from the world around them, they go on a wild chase that, as the anarchists say,
hurts both them and their figurative subjects. "He steered us through the shadows / Upon an angry tide / And cast us one by one over the side".
So could we fix that problem by having no authority? Even without unaccountable authority, large-scale direction tend to lead to unwelcome dynamics. In some areas, we already have direction -- groups whose members have picked a purpose for themselves -- and we've seen what happens when they begin to lose touch with
reality. Sports fans make a good example; when the group gets too wrapped up in its own identity, individual accountability vanishes. The people in the group give each other permission to leave all restraint behind - in the sports example, you get hooliganism. Furthermore, if the dynamics become more extreme, direction shines like a laser. Those who depart just a little from it face the wrath of the group, even if that exploration would ultimately lead to a better result.
To some extent, we can see those dynamics in "chaotic" society: polarization, "with us or against us" thinking, and overly strong focus on exploitation rather than exploration leads to that concept of many phrases: deru kui wa utareru, tall poppy syndrome, maaiveldcultuur or Jante law.
Thus it appears that maintaining a directed society is a very tall order indeed. We can't have unaccountable authority, for the authority gets corrupted and twists both itself and its subjects; but we can't have an absence of regulation either, because that either leads to fragmentation or to the unfortunate emergent properties to come into being.
I can see two solutions (apart from dissolving the problem), and neither is easy.
The first is, as has been suggested for other worlds, to have some sort of authority almost divine in its capacity to resist corruption and to embody civilization. But if beings of such complexity - of such variety - exist, then the task of managing a directed society becomes harder, too, because those beings will exist among the managed as well.
The second is to strike some balance. That is, I think, the social anarchist approach. Have communities that are about something, but recognize that they can't be too large. Give people freedom of which community to belong to. Direction need not imply strict centralized planning, the argument goes: as in other matters, have
the smaller units deal with the details, then hand what they can't handle by themselves up to the higher level and let the order grow upwards rather than being imposed from the outside.
Finally, I think I see a more general pattern. When there are many different parts (types of people, economic organizations) and they're supposed to be organized (directed society, economic planning), one usually gets one of two solutions: either that which says "let what happens happen", which leads to great highs but also lows; or that which says "let us regulate and consciously plan", which leads to uniformity. Why? I think it's as simple as this: the regulators in the second case would suffer from information overload were they to try to preserve all the different shapes of the highs while avoiding the lows, so they don't. Meanwhile, in the former case, there is no plan and so there is nothing to constrain the multitude either - with all the consequences, good and bad. "If only there were a better filtering algorithm, there wouldn't be information overload" :) And I suppose that's C&C's approach to economic planning.
Or in an opaque reference, back on directed society, and on a story that has it: if there are many ishas and many hhaza, the nobles must be very good. Government usually isn't that good, so it says there are only a few. Uniformity follows. Whether we pick chaos or heavy-handed planning, there will then be many rakadhas: in the former case, those who never find their position; in the latter, those who are forced into the wrong one because of the regulatory system's inability to respond well enough.
Yes, Kherishdar is a directed society that works - for Ai-Naidar, with the emperor and nobles. How would we find emperors and nobles of that quality here? Long-term consensus (huge supermajority) elections? Policy juries to evaluate candidates? And even if we did find them, would that society be desirable, for us?